Social Innovation drives Torino into one of Europe’s most innovative cities

Torino(Turin), and Italian city, underwent “deep change” and transformed itself into “a pole of innovation, design, information technology, higher education, and culture” city by investing in main industry like education, culture and tourism, which brought Torino about six million visitors and the 2nd place in the European Capital of Innovation Award in 2016.

What made Torino it is today is the ability to collect innovative ideas because of the strong concentration of highly educated people, competencies, resources, and networks. Considering this, Torino built an innovation platform by the government which called Torino Social Innovation (TSI), which is a platform that involves 40 public and private organizations and supports Torino’s social innovation start-ups and creating new market opportunities for urban innovations.

FaciliTO, one of the initiatives of TSI, is a service supplied by the city to provide both technical and financial support to entrepreneurial projects which aim to face new societal challenges. And Open INCET, another TSI initiative, aims to accelerate the local innovation ecosystem by systematically applying an open innovation approach.

From Torino’s story, I see the possibility that cities which have more resource of education and economic support can become centers for innovation in the country when the local government invest more in education as well as encourage local innovation activities. This requires the work from both local governments and locals with good education, but it will bring new life to cities and their citizens.